Consumer acceptability of an innovative meat burg made up of dairy cattle

A new meat burger produced from dairy cattle at the end of their milk production was proposed in this study. Dairy cattle are not used for slaughter because this meat is perceived by consumers as tough and hard difficult to chew, even if it is rich in iron and fiber, and has a high nutritional value. The new meat burger was obtained by optimizing meat formulation and a consumer test was carried out to judge its acceptability respect to a traditional meat burger. Overall acceptability and five meat sensory characteristics related to tenderness, juiciness, taste, odor and chewiness were selected and thoroughly defined for profiling. Consumers were asked to assign marks on a Likert scale for each sensory meat characteristic. A total of 215 subjects were involved in the survey. A new integrated approach was also used for evaluating the consumer acceptability, by paying attention to the psychological mechanism behind the consumers’ evaluation process. In particular, to assess how consumer judgments are influenced by their personal feeling towards the items under investigation and to evaluate the inherent uncertainty associated with the choice of the ordinal values featuring on the questionnaire responses, CUB models were used. In addition, a multidimensional scaling was proposed to confirm the presence of the latent variables estimated by CUB models and to compare different profile of evaluation. Results of this study showed the proposed integrated approach can be considered a valid tool for evaluating consumer acceptability towards new food products, thus confirming that CUB models are suitable to analyze consumer preferences by Likert scales. A good level of acceptance of the new burger was obtained, thus suggesting that this new product could represent an opportunity to exploit these livestock productions and a tool to reduce the environmental impact resulting from the disposal of animal carcasses.